Time to end parachute science
Authors: Beryne Odeny, Raffaella Bosurgi
Journal: PLoS Medicine (2022)

Colonial science, also known as parachute or parasitic science, is an extractive practice whereby researchers-typically from highly resourced countries-do research and extract data and samples from non-native regions or populations, typically low resource settings or countries, [1] without appropriately acknowledging the importance of the local infrastructure and expertise.In so doing, foreign researchers fail to establish long term, equitable collaborations with local partners [2].The era in which we are living is profoundly impacted by the effects of globalization, inequity, poverty, conflicts, climate change, biodiversity loss, and pandemics.Many of the solutions to these global health challenges come from sustainable and socially responsible behavior from societies; often, robust scientific evidence comes from collaborations among key opinion leaders, scientists, funders, policy makers, and local and international stakeholders across different countries [3].For research to be sustainable and equitable, it should be founded on inclusive scientific liaison between varied collaborators-for example, between high income countries (HICs) and low-and middle-income countries (LMICs), and early-career researchers and established scientists.Unfortunately, inclusivity and equity are not the reality in most global research [2].An indicator of this imbalance is the striking disparity in the quantity of publications by researchers in HICs compared to other regions [4].This disparity has been reported as far back as 2 decades ago-one study illustrated that only 6.5% of research articles in general medical journals had a coauthor from the country where the study population lived [5].A 2016 publication showed that less than 50% of infectious disease publications from Africa had an African first or last author [6].More recently, a bibliometric study demonstrated increasing numbers in first and last authorship among sub-Saharan African (SSA)-affiliated authors in publications about SSA [4].In geoscience, only 30% of articles from Africa had an African author [7].In the field of coral reef biology, 40% of publications that contained fieldwork conducted in Indonesia or in the Philippines did not specify which nation the field research had been conducted in; the respective figure for Australia was just 22% [1].While the engagement of local researchers is steadily increasing in fields like global health, scholarly inequities continue to be sustained through authorship hierarchies in which local authors are by default assigned middle-author positions, i.e., neither first nor last author positions [6,8].Further, collaborative authorship models commonly involve assignment of robust primary outcomes papers-the cream of the research-to researchers from HICs, while secondary papers are allocated to local scientists.These hierarchies in the author by-line perpetuate "cross-Atlantic" academic imperialism through systematic exclusion of less-advantaged researchers from prominent authorship positions-positions that are correlated with access to funding, future publications, promotions, and academic tenure [4,9].More importantly, because scientists in HICs have majority access to funding, they tend to dictate the research agenda, thus the disease priorities of the countries